25 Awesome Tools for Social Media Success

Managing your social media profiles can be a daunting task. Each major network has its own rules, and some of them even lack crucial statistics and the ability to schedule posts.

If you want to improve your level of interaction with social media, improve user engagement and make the process of social media marketing less time-consuming, then you should definitely use tools. Today, I'd like to share some of my favorites in detail.

Tools I Can’t Live Without (Suites For Multiple Networks)

Hootsuite is one of the best tools you can imagine for managing just about any social network. Dedicated to social media marketers, it can be the one and only tool you ever need, and it’s great for anyone looking for an alternative to the common Twitter interface. Hootsuite offers a free account with limited features, and the basic plan is lower than $10 per month.

I use it for Twitter and Google+. Once you’re registered, you are able to collect clicks, download activity and engagement reports, manage account groups, track posts by hashtags and schedule future tweets. Hootsuite supports Google+ formatting, but doesn’t allow you to tag other users.

The price is what I like best about this tool. It’s extremely affordable — only $9 a month for a Pro account and $49 for a Business account.

There is one word for SproutSocial and it is, “awesome." With SproutSocial you are able to:

Schedule posts for multiple times in a couple of clicks;

Discover users you should follow/unfollow on Twitter and Facebook;

Compare your Twitter account with your competitors’;

Assign tasks to different team members; and

Create beautiful reports for customers or inside presentations.

Discovery and Reports are my two favorite sections. Adding people you have already conversed with on Twitter helps you to grow your audience significantly. And reports enable us to download Facebook, Twitter and Google+ posts into Excel for further analysis. Another great feature is its Competitor Comparison. Keep an eye on your number of daily mentions and your engagement, and follow people who are talking about you.

Sumall.com is a free, powerful tool suitable for digital marketers all over the world. Interestingly enough, it doesn’t provide data on its own, but aggregates statistics from Google Analytics, PayPal, MailChimp, Twitter and Facebook, etc.

What I love the most about Sumall is its daily newsletter summarizing all activities for the previous day. It has a great Twitter overview; and, although its data for Google+ is not always accurate, its Twitter stats are invaluable.

Nonetheless it’s free. It provides a wide-ranging functionality, and you can upgrade to the Pro version for only $9 in a month (I now use the $20 plan with the detailed Twitter report). The main difference in the free account is that you can tweak alerts and get early access to new features supported by a professional manager, which can help you reach your goals.

Knowing what your competitors are up to is crucial for every marketer. What are they posting? What does their audience like best and what are their followers talking about? How is your audience growing compared to other accounts in your niche? What kind of content are your competitors posting?

Rival IQ was designed for complete competitive analysis, and it’s an absolute must-have for every social media marketer. It allows you to compare your business with your competitors. It also allows you to see the size of their networks, their posting frequency, and their total number of shares, retweets, likes and comments. This data can help you balance your social media channels and win a larger audience.

How cool is that? What’s more, RivalIQ sends you notifications of breakout posts that receive more engagement than your competitors’ posts, bringing useful information right to your mailbox! I absolutely love it.

Tools that Help You Boost Your Twitter Presence

Just Unfollow is a great free tool to manage your Twitter and Instagram followers, add users and search for users you might want to follow. And then follow your competitor's followers.

My tip: Follow influencers in your niche and or your competitors (you have a daily limit of 100). Some will follow you back; some won’t. After a while, go back and locate the accounts of users that you are following but that aren’t following you back and perform regular clean-ups. It’s better to engage and build a community around your brand with people that you are connected with.

This is an awesome tool, yet fairly simple. It’s best for a complete profile analysis — general statistics: audience, number of tweets and engagement. You can also check which lists you are in (or any other profile you are searching for). It also allows you to know who your most influential followers are and who retweets you the most. You can also dig much deeper with paid access.

The most interesting aspect is that you can analyze any Twitter account you wish, allowing you to obtain detailed visual data on tweets, retweets, replies, mentions and hashtags, and export them into Excel or PDF format in one click.

Topsy is handy when it comes to quick profile or keyword analysis. You can find key speakers and search by time, place and language. You can also set alerts and analyze your competitors. It’s easy and extremely helpful.

RiteTag is the tool for hashtag analysis and is fully compatible with Hootsuite and SproutSocial. Using the right hashtags help you reach the right audience and increase the total reach of your tweets.

Once you type in a hashtag, it turns gray, blue, green or red. Grey indicates that the hashtag is not so popular; blue means “good to go;” green stands for “excellent” and red warns you that the hashtag is overused and that your tweet is likely to disappear among all the other tweets with the same hashtag.

RiteTag has recently rolled out hashtag analysis for Google+. I recommend that you try the tool there as well. I would love to hear your feedback.

A very simple, yet effective tool that sends you a notifications about any changes in the biography of any profile. This may seems unnecessary at first, but what if someone tweets you, “Awesome new profile pic! Love it!” after you’ve just changed your profile picture? Your followers would love it too. The ability to do this makes Bio is Changed a great tool for keeping in touch with your audience when they least expect it.

This small web app could significantly increase your conversion rates. It provides the unique opportunity to convert any quotation from your blog to a re-tweetable phrase that can be submitted to Twitter with one click. This means a higher rate of engagement and higher rate of conversions. It’s free, so go ahead and can try it right now.

TweetBinder is indispensable for Twitter chats and offline events that use a Twitter hashtag. It provides full hashtag analysis, helping you keep in touch with your audience.

This tool provides analysis of two thousand tweets over a period of seven days and allows you to see your possible reach (the number of times someone might have seen your hashtag). You can also check the number of followers per contributor, average number of followers for someone contributing in the hashtag.

Tools To Improve Your Facebook Marketing

It’s a simple tool for your Facebook page with further recommendations. It’s great for competition analysis, and it’s one of the best free tools around.

LikeAlyzer not only audits your Facebook page, it also provides recommendations for improving your social media activity and engagement. This is what you get: total score at the system, page Information, general performance, post statistics and profile comparison.

This tool helps you track and analyze Google+, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles and provides an opportunity to benchmark these pages. It is useful for all brands, media groups and agencies that want to consolidate and improve their reporting on social media.

Benchmarks allow you to compare your performance with your main competitors, and customizable dashboards are handy for monitoring key metrics. Quintly reports are automatic and can be sent to people within your organization.

Heyo is a powerful tool for effective campaigns and contests across social media. It has a wide range of ready-made templates, an easy interface that enables you to create your own designs and looks great on mobile devices.

With Conversation Score you can discover key influencers on Facebook. It works very similarly to Likealyzer, but don’t expect improvement in recommendations. You would get the whole information for any Facebook page: influence, engagement and total performance. It requires no Facebook authorization and is absolutely free.

Google+ Tools Every Marketer Should Use

Do Share is a Chrome extension that helps you schedule Google+ posts from personal profiles or Google+ pages. You can set the exact date and time you want something to be posted privately or to communities. Just intstall the Do Share extention, and you’re ready to go — the job is done. Keep in mind: Chrome should be running when the post goes live.

This tool covers the whole process of auditing and optimizing your Google+ account. Through the metrics provided, you are able to take full advantage of social media. But Steady Demand isn’t just about graphs and charts; you can also receive advice on how to improve your activity. Its daily notifications about unanswered comments and posts that should be improved are super handy.

Analyze your page, niche, find influencers, track brand mentions and get insights — and I've just scratched the surface of what this tool can do. NOD3x shows you real-time data, and you can set up campaigns not only for keyword research, but for your brand’s profile, your competitor’s profiles and profiles of any influencers you can think of.

First, the tool gathers information about your profile and activity. Then it comes with alerts, so you can see what’s to be done to improve your performance. It also offers a content calendar with topic ideas and hashtags you should use. Publish it, see how your audience engages with the topic, build a content strategy and win the competition as a result.

Find top influencers with CircleCount.com. Inside you would find a bunch of statistics from your Google+ profile and from other Google+ profiles, pages and communities.

It also has a few rankings, so you can find pages and communities with better performance and learn a tip or two directly from them. Each ranking can be sorted by country, so you can monitor your reach.

This is a brilliant small tool that automatically shares content from Google+ to other social networks. If you find it hard to oversee all your business and personal accounts manually, then it’s made for you.

It also allows you to control reposts through hashtags, schedule posts and publications, use team support for accounts; and it works across all devices.

Tools for Creating Awesome Visual Content

Canva.com is one of the most beloved tools for creating covers and images for your blog or social networks. It’s free and has tons of templates. It doesn’t require installation and support logging in from Facebook.
A piece of advice: you can use free vector graphics from Pixabay.com and upload them to Canva.

The power of this tool is in its simplicity. Shoot an object with your iOS camera and you can receive its color pattern. All patterns are easily integrated into Photoshop as well as InDesign and Mobile Adobe apps.

(Bonus) Tool for Headline Ideas

No doubt, content is king in this era. But you can’t have content without a strong headline. Portent’s Content Idea Generator offers thousands of funny and creative headlines. You can test your own by this tool and find more creative ideas.

Don’t See Your Favorites?

Here’s a list of social media tools I’ve used before. Use them wisely and the heights of social media can soon be conquered.

Is your favorite tool on the list, or did I leave it off? Let me know in the comment section!

Olga, thanks for the article, there are a couple i hadnt heard of that sound interesting (Topsy, NOD3X). Since you asked the about other tools, can i suggest you look at MavSocial. it was mentioned in one of your other blogs http://www.semrush.com/blog/co...

MavSocial is a social media digital asset management, visual analytics and publishing platform. It enables users to, amongst other things
- Manage Visual Content: Upload, store and manage to a cloud based library, all images, photo, videos etc for owned, licensed and UGC
- Plan Campaigns: Simple or complex social media campaigns across multiple networks/pages, including campaign calendar
- Schedule & Publish: Text, images and videos (not just YouTube links) to all major social media networks
- Reporting: social network, social media campaigns, visual content
There is a free version, i am one of the founders

Also we have started using a very good social sharing plugin called Social Warfare, which we are very impressed with- i am not associated with this one!

Great list, Olga. And thank you for giving Sprout Social an awesome mention! Just wanted to share that our pricing plan changed earlier in the year – our plans begin at $59/month and up which carry an amazing array of new product features that we've released in recent weeks. Thanks again for the mention. We'll see you in the new year!

Darryl, we absolutely love SproutSocial! Your reports and discovery sections are the most visited, compared your followers' suggestions with Followerwonk of Moz and SproutSocial provides better info and suggestions.
Put a mental note about the updated pricing strategy, I think you gained more competitive advantage with it! Wish you all the best in 2015 and I hope we'll get you guys on our weekly Twitter chat as special guests some time :)

Thanks for recommending RiteTag, Olga! Actually, our analytics in the integrated sites, including Facebook and Google+ are based on Twitter engagement. There is a huge overlap of the value of hashtags between Twitter and the others, so we provide these analytics in Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. We also integrate with Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, as you noted - but also in Buffer, SproutSocial and SocialOomph, too.

Look out in January, RiteTaggers - for tagging influencers and adding more elements in our Composer and throughout the integrated sites. RiteTag aims to do total social media optimization; within months, hashtag analytics as-you-type will be but one of a slew of RiteTag exclusive features.